Guild Wars 2

Thunderclap nerf was uncalled for, but Anet never goes back on a nerf unless the community literally goes insane over it.

Necro definitely belongs at 3. It really lost what made it fun two patches ago, and it still is receiving nerfs.

Glad I could help! I’ll work on a follow-up. We can make this into a fun Necro forum project.

Staff 1 is silly. This isn’t the Adams Family. Creepy Ghost hands are not amusing or intimidating. This skill is slow so it naturally sucks in PvP.
The rest of the staff skills could use a manual trigger to apply more utility. It would make Necro a lot more pleasant. What if staff 5’s manual was a teleport?

Vice of Wrath’s active is way too strong. CC and give the target an unremovable enemy buffer? Nope.
Vice of Envy’s active is incorrectly named Vice of Wrath. It is also too strong for the exact same reason.
Vice of Gluttony’s active isn’t as crazy, but the taunt is too much on all of them.
Shroud 1: So does the Shroud one attack like the ranger warhorn birds, because that seems rather intense. Pair it with dhuumfire? Nope.
Shroud 2: Taunt on a 10s cooldown is also too much. Cut down on the CC spam. CC spam is not fun.
Shroud 3: The fear on shroud 3 is fine, but the taunt on kitten cd is not
Shroud 4: Lots of physical damage here. Not seeing a lot of condi damage. Also high damage turrets are debatably bad.
Shroud 5: I’m not sure. It feels like everything on this spec is a taunting turret though.
Torch: It should be ranged. Burn spam is kinda gross though
The heal is pretty cool, but we have nothing that can take advantage of it on our toolbar other than staff 4 (lol).
Torch 2 and 3 want to be power while Torch 1 wants to be burn spam.
The elite needs to chill out, but not go the way of chill.
Utility 1 is very Mallyx. Not sure that it really plays well with Necro.
Utility 2 is very elite-esque.
Utility 3 is not a stunbreak. Also, I’m not sure that forcing people to stand on a little buff circle for so long is a good plan.
Ok, so the taunt traits are unbelievably cruel.
Burn on chill and chill on burn needs an icd so that it can’t stack indefinitely.
There are so many traits that I can’t really talk about all of them, so basically everything except for grandmaster 1 seems overtuned.
Conclusion: On the power side, this has tons of damage, damage reduction, cc, boons, modifiers… It’s too much
The condis feel like an afterthought. A lot of burn spam, one bleed trait, and one random condi in shroud.
Tone down the damage, damage reduction, cc, and boons and incorporate more condi variety and a set of condi traits.
You came here for critique. I chose not to hold anything back, so this took me an hour to write. Hope this helps!

Durability is a strong choice in WvW. You’ll be like a demigod if you pair it with ascended Marauder’s gear.

I think somebody needs to swallow his/her pride and go back on this insane nerf. I think it is the worst nerf in this entire game’s life, and there are some pretty serious competitors.
It’s been 3 years, and no amount of kitten cream is going to make us feel better.

If you’ve played Fire Emblem Fates, you know what I’m talking about. Instead of the boring combat music that is so lame you can choose to disable it, have the game music transition to a more energetic version of the same song the game was just playing when you enter combat. I think this will help Arenanet make their map music more engaging and immersive.

I am competent at every class except Thief, Mesmer, and to an extent, Revenant. However, Thief is my worst class by far. I’ve never seen a thief that simply flat out fails as much as I do on mine. I want to be able to use my Thief competently, because it’s very safe in WvW when the person behind it is not me, and it is always useful for skirmishes.

-I tried S/D and failed to understand how to inflict damage
-I tried condi D/D for the sake of it and found that I don’t understand it and I don’t like it
-I avoided Condi P/D because facerolling isn’t fun
-I tried D/P a long time ago, but I was ineffective with it

Looking for some advice and build suggestions to elevate my thief gameplay to second or third worst so that I can actually win a fight. This is for WvW only btw.

Signet of Spite is does pretty negligible damage. Whatever condi burst kills you is from something else. For example, thief can land multiple damaging conditions on you like it’s nothing.

Don’t even bother solo roaming in Reaper. Condi Reaper can’t break the cheese druids that run gs/staff and heal non stop. Since you are FA, you may face YB, which has one of those druids that roams with a bunch of thieves. Thieves will stun you to death. The druid will cheese you to death. Also, your party may outrun you when they are getting run over by the zerg, so you are the #1 sacrifice.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

So bandwagoning is a part of the reason why the tiers are as they are now. I can accept that. But how about BG getting manually placed into T2? Somewhere there was a thread were Devon talked about the percentages of matchmaking. With BG’s rating, it should have been mathematically impossible for the #2 server to be knocked down a tier.

With DB artificially bumped to #1 in T1, and BG artificially knocked down to T2, is this just a way for Anet to spice up the competition?

Rolling a t2 matchup =/= dropping to t2

Some classes have skills that are perfectly fine in PvP or PvE but could be broken if they were buffed for WvW. However, some classes are terrible in zerg combat.
The prime example would be thief. Shadow refuge only works on 5 people, thieves have very few AoEs, and they are too squishy to fight on the front line.
What if Caltrops were upgraded into an anti-zerg AoE?
-Add damage ticks that scale with power and double when the foe is moving
-Increase target cap to 10
-Increase Cripple duration so that zergs actually feel it
This would be insane in sPvP because you have to fight on point, and it would be insane in PvE because mobs don’t know to move out of it. However, in WvW, this actually nerfs ghost thief by taking a no reveal AoE away, and it’s pretty useless in small scale where people don’t have to stand in it. With a change like this, Thieves can actually contribute to a zerg fight.
Here’s a change to Smokescreen:
-Instead of applying 1 blind for walking through it, it applies an effect that pulses blind for 5 seconds.
This will mess up melee trains that charge through massive CC fields and deadly AoE’s that they are temporarily immune to by reducing their outgoing damage for a few seconds. It’s pretty extreme in PvE, but any player who is paying attention won’t walk into it.

I’m not requesting these specific buffs. I’m saying that it would be nice if changes like these are made only in WvW to make every player useful in WvW zergs.

Alright, so here’s a layout suggestion if we assume that every server is equally distributed. I think that 9 servers will make for better matchup organization than 12, so I am going to use 9 servers for this example.
First week is random. 3/3/3. Next week, the three first, second, and third place servers fight. On week three, The top two face off again, and the bottom two face off again, but the third slot gets switched with the winner/loser in the middle tier. Week four is the finale of the cycle. If a team lost week one, they could still get back to the top and win the final match. Then after week four, everything resets.
Rewards for winning a cycle are also an option, and it could all hinge on that final week, so players don’t have to burn themselves out if they aim for getting first on week one, second on week two and three, and first on week four.
You could call it “The Great Mist War,” because it is the summation of every foe you face in the mists.
Give out server awards for multiple things, such as:
-Best k/d ratio
-Highest final score
-Most successful yak deliveries
-ect.

Jana.6831:

The server linking alone puts a huge strain on all of us – can we please not forget that community is a huge factor in wvw and I guess that is Jayne’s initial point anyway – too many new faces can destroy any functioning server.

Teamspeak hell is a problem. I think that Arenanet should establish a built-in voice com program so that changing servers doesn’t create as much confusion.

Zelulose.8695:

What? Tempest is suppot? They have a bunch of aoe damage dealing overloads. Other then that their core role hasn’t changed much when transferring into elite spec.

Look at druid it got pure aoe heals from its celestial forum and aoe heals from traits now that is support I can’t understand people who think ele is support when other classes are better at supporting.

From my experience, support ele is usually better at bringing support and meaningful damage at the same time. They nerfed the support, they nerfed the damage, they removed the support + damage amulet.

It’s number one because it moved into t1 when the other two servers had stopped trying. Sleeping t1 sucks.

You could build a more advanced version of how maps in PvE put you in the same instance as guildmates and friends (preferably mutual friends), add a favorites feature that allows you to guarantee a spot with a small handful of people, and then wipe WvW and redistribute people based on those parameters. To keep things fresh, have the whole system refresh bimonthly. If the system works well, transfers won’t be necessary. If it messes up, file a support ticket.
It would keep matchups fresher and it removes the concept of bandwagoning altogether.

That works fine for t2 and t3, but it causes stagnation for t1 and t4, which is currently a problem. Since they can move only one way, they only get one new opponent per week.

Most people want to be in the same place as their friends and their guilds, so any sort of randomization would have to prioritize pairing mutual friends and guild mates onto the same server.
If people are allowed to move around, we could very easily end up where we are now, so an algorithm that pairs people with as many of their guilds and friends as possible would be essential. A favorites list may help allow you to guarantee being paired with a small number of people. With that in place, there wouldn’t need to be transfers.
I don’t know though, it could get messy.

Jourdelune.7456:

Trigr.6481:

Jourdelune.7456:

Trigr.6481:

Josh Davis.6015:

Hey folks,

Just a quick reminder: the PvP team is not responsible for profession balance. The PvP team, along with all of the other major feature teams, provides feedback to the skills team, but the PvP team itself is not directly involved in making balance changes.

-Grouch

Even though grouch isn’t to blame, he essentially just told you the problem regardless if you’ve realized it or not. Since PvP is not being balanced separate from the rest of the game, the most “balance” you’re going to get is from a team who’s main concern is not SPvP. There’s a reason why every major balance patch there’s an amulet gone and a new one taking it’s place, because that’s the only thing other than runes and sigils that the PvP team in particular has complete control over, it’s just the only thing they have to change that won’t effect the rest of the game. So of course that’s the only action they can take, however that doesn’t mean it’s the right move, just a desperate one.

Until this changes the overall player population will suffer, pro league will continue to suffer in both team participation, team quality, and so on. Primarily fueled by players who are not even in it for the competitive aspect or even enjoying the game as a whole, but to siphon off whatever money is left in a dying community, it’s sad really.

Countless

I am sorry Countless but you got the smoked screen.

In negotiation or politics, the tactics to say “We are not responsible” really means, we are responsible for being powerless.

And they are not powerless.

They did removed Cleric without giving alternative to the support playstyle.

Support need a way to beat some cleave to REZ and stomp properly.

Now… to make some PR damage mitigation, they say they are not responsible… but they ARE.

They removed an amulet that was for 4 years important for a class archetype of our game mode. The support bunker. They did this without giving a Templar rune or something with less toughness on it.

The worse is Cleric Amulet is just fine, since Tempest got nerfed across the board, it could be correct to let Cleric live.

Here is the key word of the Powerful PVP team:
“For this release, we wanted to take support down a notch and increase the pace of combat.”

Well.. a notch would had been to give us a 4 stats amulet with toughness and healing power with perhaps less damage.

But no…. it’s not a notch. The PVP team clearly want to delete ROCK.

Mender is bad. People like how it feels, but when META will settle… no one will play squishie support over squishie dps or bruisers condies.

tl;dr – The not responsible is a smoked screen that means they are powerless.

They are responsible for the removal of the amulet. The nerf on Tempest were enough.

Removing the amulet without giving another one to take down support a notch, is removing support as a whole on the meta.

Did you even read my post? I just said grouch wasn’t to blame because he’s in marketing for the company, I also never said that we should not hold people accountable, just not grouch in this situation. If you’re going to play the blame game direct your nonsense at someone that’s actually responsible.

Countless

I think you misunderstood me.

I am not Blaming Grouch (I never said his name BTW), not Blaming anyone.

The one who made the blaming game here, is the one who said the balanced team didn’t balanced the Tempest properly.

From what I read on patch notes, the massives nerf to ele seems suffisant. Removing the cleric amulet was not to Balance the Tempest.

From the WORDs of Grouch:

“For this release, we wanted to take support down a notch and increase the pace of combat.”

You don’t like the Truth? I am not the messenger (Grouch) nor a member of Anet. So I am powerless, much more than those (who did choose) that chose to remove the support archetype in the game.

I don’t care if the DEV team is BLACK, YELLOW or PINK.

I do care about support being able to do their work with VIABLE Archetype in META.

Paladin tempest / guard / whatever can’t heat the cleave of 1 dps. How to rez if 1 dps cleave, while 1 support rez and the cleave win all the time?

So, please keep your “blaming” game for yourself.

Tempest is the support Specialization. Taking support away from Tempest leaves it gutted. The problem isn’t that they nerfed Tempest. The problem is that they nerfed Tempest AND they didn’t add a new playstyle for ele. Like you said, support builds are struggling to do their jobs now. The only thing Tempest has other than support is sub-par fresh air burst specs. If massively nerfing professions is needed to be “sufficient,” they should have at least sufficiently compensated Eles elsewhere. The way balance is being handled just makes people angry and not want to play.

This patch really can’t kill WvW. It added nothing, it removed nothing. In the WvW feature department, at least. Profession balance is aggravating to say the least. Has the zerg meta changed yet? Nope. Has the roaming/small scale meta changed? A lot of things are worse now except for Warrior, which was already the best, so WvW was clearly ignored. WvW as a whole wasn’t really hurt, but many people are unhappy because the professions and builds they like don’t just get little nerfs; they get blown up. Here’s my perspective:

My Ele stopped being fun when HoT released, because D/D died and support D/F ele became the big thing. My Necro stopped being fun when chill was gutted, because it couldn’t handle the op sustain builds anymore, and now my Engi is taking a hit. The only other thing I like playing in small scale WvW is my condi longbow ranger, which thankfully got buffs instead of nerfs. However, my range of classes was nerfed from 4 down to 1 or 2 since HoT released because what I liked to play was gutted. This is what makes people quit the game during these patches. I play with a lot of professions. Some people only like to play specific playstyles, which get all but deleted because they were strong in another format. With the thing they put all of their time into gone, these people quit.
Why do I stay around? Robert Gee has done some really good things in the past for Necro, so I believe that profession balance may actually stop making me angry one day, and I want to be a Tengu, so I’ll wait for that.

Sorry, you’re probably out of luck for the time being. A few weeks ago, JQ was open. It will be closed for a while now.

Anti anti projectile would be sweet and make the skill mandatory for any ranger with a bow. Apply bleeds with every hit for 15 seconds? Quick draw Rapid fire, Rapid Fire, and swap to staff 1111 plus bleed on crit trait and bleed on crit sigil. That’s kind of insane.

What I mean is when did you enjoy ele the most?
Personally, I enjoyed my D/D ele the most right after the specialization patch. I was playing my ele the day before the patch, frustrated about how my build failed at dealing damage. Suddenly, my ele did good damage, and I was able to compete against the other crazy specs in WvW. Another reason why I liked this edition of Ele the most was that this addition of Necro was by far the worst, so I couldn’t use my Necro in small scale WvW.

My next favorite was the pre rtl nerf ele. Even though I still clicked on skills way back then, it felt really fun to play, and rtl wasn’t the worst mobility skill in the game (I will never forgive them) yet.

I’m not sure that paywalls are a good move. Most people don’t want to pay more than the price of the game to change environments, and the people who do probably have lots of money to spend.
Also, link 1 shows that manually lowering the pop cap of all linked servers doesn’t mean anything when the high population servers just sit there at super full and one server can’t compete because it is less full than the tier above it.
Link 2 is Anet’s solution to this
Link 3 shows a weakness in linked vs unlinked servers creating population imbalance. However, it did shake up T1 so that’s not entirely bad, and BG and TC may not be trying right now.
I think a bigger problem is the Glicko wall that separates the bottom two servers from the servers above it. They have fallen so far that nothing short of folding them into t3 servers can save them.

Jayne.9251:

Cecilia.5179:

You can’t beat bandwagoning. It is a psychological fact. You can take actions to stop it from getting out of hand. For example, you can lock servers that have too much incoming or outgoing traffic.

They tried that.

This is what they got:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/About-Full-Server-Status-And-Guilds

I could add a dozen different links all saying the same thing, but you get the idea.

I would say offer support to guilds that get split in half. I doubt even a psychologist with a PhD can come up with a perfect, satisfy everyone solution. Still, leaving the game stagnant risks death. Try lying in bed and not moving for a month. Actually, don’t because it may kill you. MMO’s need to change to survive. GW2 WvW is no exception.

You can’t beat bandwagoning. It is a psychological fact. You can take actions to stop it from getting out of hand. For example, you can lock servers that have too much incoming or outgoing traffic.

1 dev per profession would be a great luxury. Maybe then our respective devs would have enough time to actually read and comment on their respective forums. Silence makes people angry. Look at Pokemon Go. The most popular game of all time’s reddit went from happy to savage overnight because Niantic makes frustrating changes without talking about it.
Ideally, a dev would appear to the Necro forum, get the scoop on what people want, and then work to implement it (aka make Necro axe and greatsword viable). Since the dev doesn’t need to leap to another profession right away, he or she can also look at what is sub-par in WvW and make WvW exclusive changes to improve it.

Personally, the reason I find Necro weak is because it is trash tier in the part of the game I play the most of. Small scale WvW. Why? Necro is brought down by too many high sustain builds that can’t be killed by Necro’s meh damage anymore, inability to avoid being run over, lack of good stability.
The last two can be overcome, but going into WvW and immediately getting killed by an immortal Druid that wins by pressing 1 and kiting away whenever you get close or a Warrior with 30k hp, 2600 armor, and the ability to hit for 10k like it’s nothing while regenerating more hp than weak bleeds can dish out is more than disheartening. It’s simply unplayable.

Zelulose.8695:

But what if he is actually part of this controversial, mysterious balance team? We technically have no concrete knowledge of who is doing the balance. They need to let us communicate to the people involved and those involved in actual skill balance need to be the ones responding to us. Not the messenger boys who currently do.

As far as I know, Karl is in charge of ele balance. That’s probably why the negativity is mostly pinned on him.

Ensign.2189:

Epidemic is ignoring duration stacking limits. For instance a target can only have 3 stacks of immobilize at a time, but epi bombs ignore that and can thus inflict very long duration CC. I’m guessing they are looking at fixing that problem instead of just nerfing it across the board because of it.

Once upon a time, I had that kind of faith in the balance team.

The balance team is not in touch with their respective communities. Robert Gee came out of the dark to try and make all of the specializations he was in charge of release with what the players wanted out of them. Since then, all of the balance team has gone back to incognito mode and resumed making backhanded balance decisions that don’t make sense. WvW balance is at an all time low with broken stat combos like Minstrel’s and Dire being ignored because they are absent in sPvP.

Normalize=change from situationally strong to always bad

Peura.3796:

Seeing the latest hairstyles for charr made me almost choke on my coffee. Who designs the charr hair? ._.

The former art team for dbz, obviously

No WvW balance is extremely unsatisfying. Since PvP amulets can be pulled out on a whim, balance in that category does not line up with WvW anymore.
-Thieves can now spam basilisk venom at no cost to their attack power.
-Dire makes classes like mesmer unkillable condi gods
-Adrenal Health makes a marauder warrior tank enough to face tank three people (actually easier than tanking 1 person because arc divider is so easy to land)
-Minstrel gear allows druids to kite around and never die but still do large damage with buffed pets
-Zerg meta is still the same from launch
-Ride the lightning is still the worst gap closer in the gane
-Anti projectile is very polarized (absolutely none or omg my longbow does 0 damage)
-Necromancer does mediocre damage and can’t handle more than 1 foe at a time, so it sucks at roaming
-Paper siege sucks and superior siege is really good. This means that only rich people can command.
-Many classes cannot function without specific traitlines (Soul Reaping/Defense/Water) in competitive WvW.
I don’t believe that WvW is supposed to be such a weird balance calamity, so I hope that our balance team can finally put some real effort into improving WvW for certain classes.

I’ve said this before, but I think that the super high damage conditions should be reallocated to precision based damage. This means that attrition builds can still work with just condition damage, but the burstier conditions all require a solid crit chance to work as well as they currently do.

Honestly, I think that t4 should just get phazed out. It is an entire grade below what the other tiers have to offer. People still place regular acs on the front side of the wall without realizing that everyone can hit it and that it is totally useless. I think merging all of those people into better environments would improve their experience and help them learn (I moved to Eredon Terrace for several weeks, so this is my personal experience).

Honestly, I think that t4 should just get phazed out. It is an entire grade below what the other tiers have to offer. People still place regualr acs on the front side of the wall like it is the correct way to place siege. I think merging all of those people into better environments would improve their experience.

They had a Reaper wearing this way way back when they were doing previews for specializations. Definitely an upcoming outfit

It would totally be worth the effort to make backpieces have dye channels. The amount of effort<the levels of happiness

This hairstyle is all I could ever hope for. I would die if I could have hair like this.
Also, dyable accessories. I don’t like having to chose between basic colors like poop-black and bird poop-white

I’ve been playing around with the change, and I found that it is now very easy to keep perma-fury going, which means lots of extra bleeds for condi longbow.

CynicalFred.9135:

“We don’t balance for wvw”
-The Gods

Pretty sure they’ve never said that. The community just likes to think that, and when somebody complains about the effetiveness of a class in a part of WvW, people like to say that the devs don’t balance for that.
In truth, they never have bothered to add WvW only changes. However, SPvP is becoming more alien to WvW with every patch (no bunker amulets, fewer hybrid amulets). I think we should advocate for WvW to receive its own balance.

Skills that were too good when traited: rtl
Reason: it was almost a viable mobility skill while traited

I don’t think anybody complained this time around. The sustain nerf feels like it was decided upon immediately after the last set of nerfs and just didn’t make it into those by a few days. Both power and condi reaper are mediocre right now.

Necro should be added to the lose list. They took a big hit to their best sustain utility for some “QoL” changes on skills that see little to no use.
The spectral walk/spectral armor buffs the only positive thing, but it doesn’t make a huge difference.

Nightshade.2570:

So the question has started to become, Has base necro returned as better than Reaper.

Reaper shroud still has Stability, mobility, and viable dhuumfire, so no. Also, curses/death magic/soul reaping hasn’t improved since the original specialization nerf, so it is likely about as effective as running around naked.

I can’t really be upset about this when I look around and see the carnage that is every other profession bar warrior.

Hexalot.8194:

Cecilia.5179:

Hexalot.8194:

Cecilia.5179:

Does PvP split include WvW?

Nope.

WvW is typically lumped with PvE unless specified otherwise.

So adrenal health was untouched in the game mode where it was the strongest? I have no words.

I actually was of the opinion that if it was gonna get nerfed, PVP was the prime target since most of the complaints seem to come from that game mode. If you get focused (typically WvW scenario), Adrenal Health isn’t going to be what keeps you alive.

In conjuntion with Arc Divider and 3 semi-invulns, Adrenal health made 2v1ing a competent berserker in Marauder gear incredibly difficult. It needed to be toned down.

Necromancer is mediocre and unnoteworthy right now. This is evidenced by the lack of discussion about Necromancers in the other forums. The Necro “QoL” update does nothing for Necromancers.
Example of what QoL means to players:
-Utility cooldowns are now visible in Death Shroud
-Vital Persistence is now baseline
Example of Balance team’s “QoL”
-Wicked Spiral: This skill will now fire the correct number of whirl finishers.
-Spiteful Spirit: The version of Unholy Feast that this trait executes will now include the player’s weapon damage.
-Spinal Shivers: This skill casts approximately 0.25 seconds faster than before.

I want a new balance team lol